Joe Clark has written a report about Canadian election web sites:
An independent, nonpartisan review of Canadian political Web sites shows that all sites tested:
- do not meet Web standards, meaning their underlying code is grammatically incorrect
- probably work correctly in only one browser, Internet Explorer for Windows, even though not all Canadians use that browser
- usually don’t bother identifying the language in which they are written (English or French)
- are somewhat inaccessible to people with disabilities
You can read the press release and the findings on the website of Joe Clark. The results of the findings were quite interesting. It seems that almost none of the political parties have even considered accessibility or validation. Probably more interesting is the fact that some thought that they were doing fancy XHTML stuff while validating as HTML gave fewer errors...
Well at least the New Democrats used a css based layout... (and I guess you could say that the Bloc Québécois (English) site was the only one that didn't get it wrong ;-])